Marinate Chicken In This Salty Ingredient For A Juicier Bite (Hint: It's Not Pickle Juice)

If you decide to wet- instead of dry-brine your chicken, achieving a beautiful flavor and incredibly juicy bite only becomes easier. But when you swap out the standard salt and stock with the liquid from a container of feta, you get the chance to easily incorporate some truly unique tastes while also reducing your food waste.

Brining the cheese is all about osmosis, swapping out the water in meat for a sodium-infused blend that carries its flavors directly into the muscle fibers. It also helps preserve food, which is why it's so common to see feta packed in salty water. But while the cheese sits, it also infuses the brine with richly fermented umami notes that pair perfectly with chicken. This represents a rare opportunity to incorporate cheese into a marinade, infusing a bit of creamy flavor while providing a ton of moisture directly into your poultry's meat.

This is just another reason why you shouldn't bother with crumbled feta, since it tends to be far drier. It may also lack the brightness that defines the cheese and makes it pair so excellently with both lean white meat and heartier dark meat. Depending on how long you let it sit in the brine, the lactic acid of the cheese may also help tenderize the chicken, so you get a ton of advantages with no more effort than draining a block and transferring the juice.

Brining is extremely effective at making meat more tender, juicy, and tasty, but it also has some quirks. It's easy to "oversalt" your proteins by letting them sit too long, and feta brine itself is a bit delicate, so you won't be able to use it quite the same way you would with just salt and water.

Typically, making an extra flavorful brine involves heating the ingredients together and letting them steep as they cool. However, the subtle flavors of a feta brine can change when exposed to heat, particularly the microbial ones from things like rennet and Lactobacillus. Rather than simmering the ingredients, you may have better luck marinating your herbs and spices with the brine the day before adding your chicken. This properly seasons your brine, infusing it with all those aromatic oils ahead of time, so they can later sink into your meat.

Another reason feta is such a great brining liquid is that it has roughly the same recommended salt percentage as a homemade one: about 6%. How long you should brine depends on the cut, with boneless pieces only needing a couple of hours and whole chickens needing closer to eight. But even if you're short on time, marinating for only 30 minutes to an hour can still give it a great bump in taste. The longer your brine time, the less salt you'll need to add later, but don't let it sit so long that you may risk overpowering your other seasonings.